“Once upon a time there was a physicist. He was productive and happy and dwelt in a land filled with improbably proportioned and overly cheerful forest creatures. Then a great famine of funding occurred and the dark forces of string theory took power and he was cast forth into the wild as a heretic. There he fought megalomaniacs and bureaucracies and had many grand adventures that appear strangely inconsistent on close inspection. The hero that emerged has the substance of legend.

But back to me. I experienced a similar situation as a young physicist, but in modern English and without the hero bit. However, once upon a time I DID write physics papers. This is their story…

My research was in an area called Renormalization Group theory (for those familiar with the subject, that’s the “momentum-space” RG of Quantum Field Theory, rather than the position-space version commonly employed in Statistical Mechanics – although the two are closely related).

In simple terms, one could describe the state of modern physics (then and now) as centering around two major theories: the Standard Model of particle physics, which describes the microscopic behavior of the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces, and General Relativity, which describes the large scale behavior of gravity. These theories explain all applicable evidence to date, and no prediction they make has been excluded by observation (though almost all our effort has focused on a particular class of experiment, so this may not be as impressive as it seems). In this sense, they are complete and correct. However, they are unsatisfactory. Their shortcomings are embodied in two of the major problems of modern physics (then and now): the origin of the Standard Model and a unification of Quantum Field Theory with General Relativity (Quantum Field Theory itself is the unification of Quantum Mechanics with Special Relativity). My focus was on the former problem. The Standard Model is not philosophically satisfying. Besides the Higgs particle, which is a critical component but has yet to be discovered, there is a deeper issue. The Standard Model involves a large number of empirical inputs (about 21, depending on how you count them), such as the masses of leptons and quarks, various coupling constants, and so on. It also involves a specific non-trivial set of gauge groups, and doesn’t really unify the strong force and electro-weak force (which is a proper unification of the electromagnetic and weak forces). Instead, they’re just kind of slapped together. In this sense, it’s too arbitrary. We’d like to derive the entire thing from simple assumptions about the universe and maybe one energy scale. There have been various attempts at this. Our approach was to look for a “fixed point”. My studying which theories are consistent as we include higher and higher energies, we hoped to narrow the field from really really big to less really really big – where less really really big is 1. My thesis and papers were a first shot at this, using a simple version of Qunatum Field Theory called scalar field theory (which coincidentally is useful in it’s own right, as the Higgs particle is a scalar particle). We came up with some interesting results before the aforementioned cataclysms led to my exile into finance.

Unfortunately, because of the vagaries of copyright law I’m not allowed to include my actual papers. But I can include links. The papers were published in Physical Review D and Physical Review Letters. When you choose to build upon this Earth Shattering work, be sure to cite those. They also appeared on the LANL preprint server, which provides free access to their contents. Finally, my thesis itself is available. Anyone can view it, but only MIT community members can download or print it. Naturally, signed editions are worth well into 12 digits. So print and sign one right away.